


Enfranchised

by matrixrefugee



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-20 06:11:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17617010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: On Election Day, Abbie and Ichabod discuss the importance of voting





	Enfranchised

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](https://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/profile)[fic_promptly](https://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/)'s [Sleepy Hollow - Ichabod Crane - he's genuinely glad they gave women the vote](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/2013/11/05/tuesday-nov-5th-politics.html?thread=8734941#cmt8734941)

Election day and Abbie had gone right to the precinct, avoiding the polls where she could, though she still got caught in traffic as people headed out to vote or slowed down to beep at the campaigners holding up signs promoting their respective candidates. Not that she wanted to vote anyway: choosing between the least of two or more evils had grown more and more tedious over time.

Not surprisingly, she found Crane had already arrived and had commandeered her laptop, watching the news feed on the election results. As she approached, he looked up to meet her gaze, then nodded and relinquished the machine.

"Have you enacted your civic duty already?" he asked.

"If that's a polite way of asking why I'm late, I'm gonna have to disappoint you," she replied. "It was because of all this civic duty that I'm late: my house is near one of the polling station and the traffic got heavy.

"Besides, I figured you would think less of me if I'd been to vote, when I should have been home churning butter or something," she added, dryly.

He gave her an odd look, then replied patiently, "Either you have me mistaken for someone from a later time period, or you were making a jest. I am very pleased that women in this country and in this age have the right to vote; I only wish that their being granted this privilege had come much sooner."

She quirked an eyebrow at him. "Oh really? I figured women were too emotional or something like that."

"There are, I will admit, far too many women who follow their hearts without stopping to consider the consequences of their actions, but following one's brain without listening to the counsel of the heart is just as wrong a way to live. Just as people regardless of sex are capable of committing crimes of the heart, so people are just as capable of rationalizing atrocities for the good of society."

"Like the Nazis rationalizing the death camps and the medical experiments they did to the prisoners?" Abbie asked.

He looked at her thoughtfully and said, "I was thinking of people in my own time rationalizing enslaving their fellow humans and treating people with skin of a different color as if they were cattle."

"Well said," she replied. "So what are you trying to say? That voting requires a balance of reason and conviction?"

"That was what I had in mind, in so many words," Crane replied. "Men generally vote with their minds, while women tend to vote with their hearts and souls. Even when their vote proves to be a less than ideal decision, they still vote out of love and concern and a passion that drives their decision."

Abbie folded her arms on her chest. "All right, name one time when women made a less than ideal decision."

"I was thinking of that little matter known as the Eighteenth Amendment."

She raised both eyebrows now. "Prohibition?" she asked. "But women couldn't vote just yet back then."

"They may not have had the vote then, but they lobbied for it, fought for it. You might say it was the moment when they had a vote for change, if not the right to actually step into a polling station and cast a ballot. They did so hoping to save themselves or their sisters from the social ills caused by excessive drinking, but in so doing, another set of problems arose, the kind that come from policing a person's private life," he said. "And when they saw what had happened, they used their new privilege to vote to restore the country to some level of sanity."

"Hah, never thought of it that way, or if I did, I never looked back far enough: You hear a lot about Women's Lib in the Sixties and Seventies but we don't hear a lot about their grandmothers trying to get the vote," she said.

"Was there not a historian who said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it?" he noted.

"Yeah, I just hope we don't do something as dumb as Prohibition."

"And that people never forget that women have always had voices that need to be heard and more importantly, heeded," he said sagely, and she wondered if he was thinking of his wife...


End file.
